New York Times: Frequent Search Engine Users, Google Is Watching and Counting

The sometimes luddite New York Times printed another piece generating a privacy hysteria regarding an innocuous Google practice. The search engine is tracking repeat usage with a cookie (Lock up the kids! Bar the doors!). The NY Times itself is a much more extensive user of cookies and profiling than Google, yet the article implies the practise is sinister.

If Google is to improve the quality of search results, it will eventually need to track searches over time developing a user profile. If a misguided media quash this kind of activity, we all suffer. Google isn’t perfect, but this is much ado about nothing.